The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., has only 400-odd containers of legacy transuranic (TRU) waste left for shipment to DOE’s underground disposal site in New Mexico.
The Savannah River Site has loaded and shipped more than 35,000 containers of the legacy waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., since 1999, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said in a Tuesday blog.
These 400 remaining legacy transuranic waste containers are not part of the department’s dilute and dispose program, according to DOE.
The remaining ones from Savannah River’s Solid Waste Management Facility need special care. That’s because much of the remaining waste was first generated and packaged back in the 1950s, predating WIPP and its vetting procedures by decades, DOE said in the announcement.
So far, 1,740 total shipments from the Solid Waste Management Facility have been made to WIPP, said Dennis Carr, CEO of the site’s Fluor-led prime contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS).
“As legacy containers continue to ship, it becomes increasingly more difficult to group and certify containers due to variables associated with the type of materials contained, availability of historic documentation, container integrity and plutonium equivalent curies limits,” Jonathan Hall said in the DOE blog. Hall is the SRNS deputy manager for the Solid Waste Facility.
The DOE blog did not say when the department anticipates the last of the legacy TRU waste will be shipped to WIPP from the South Carolina complex.
